To some Britons, holiday is no treat - Europe - International Herald Tribune

LONDON — Living in an apartment here has many advantages, and one of them, said Hilary Boyd, is the joy of not being accosted by marauding bands of sugar-propelled, Americanized children every Oct. 31.

"All they want is sweets," said Boyd, a 57-year-old writer, sounding genuinely surprised. "They're not scaring you, or singing to you, or charming you - they're just grabbing it and going to the next house and then going home to be sick."

Halloween is big business here now. According to The Observer, Britons spend an estimated $228 million a year on Halloween-related items, a tenfold increase from five years ago.

Sainsbury's, one of Britain's largest supermarket chains, has sold 450,000 pumpkins and 40,000 sets of glow-in- the-dark fangs this year, not to mention items like fake cobwebs and cookies that look like severed fingers.

"It's a very important time for our customers," said Melanie Etches, a spokeswoman.

But it is still a rude culture shock for a generation of older people whose need for a macabre autumn festival was traditionally satisfied by Bonfire Night. That holiday is celebrated by building a fire around a homemade effigy of Guy Fawkes, the Irish Catholic perpetrator of the unsuccessful plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, and shouting happily as it burns to a crisp. Fireworks are set off, sausages are eaten, and some people toss effigies of unpopular politicians on the fire for good measure.

But Bonfire Night tends not to be celebrated on Nov. 5, the day the plot was discovered, but on the nearest convenient Saturday. And many local bonfires have been canceled because of new safety regulations - requiring guardrails, fire marshals and the like - that are proving prohibitively expensive to meet.

This withering away of homegrown tradition makes people hate Halloween all the more. What could be more unattractive, they argue, than a bunch of rapacious, acquisitive children traipsing around the streets, demanding candy in exchange for nothing?

"Trick or treat? I don't know about you, but my answer to this question, if I'm honest, would be unprintable in a family newspaper," the critic A.N. Wilson wrote recently in The Daily Mail. "Let's say it's stronger than 'push off.' Yet the little beggars will soon be round, banging and ringing at our doors with this irritating refrain."

Wilson blamed "the kitsch hotchpotch known as American Gothic."

Hugh O'Donnell, a professor of language and popular culture at Glasgow Caledonian University, said in an interview that "the main complaint is that it's just fun without any meaning behind it."

"It's no longer got any relationship to anything - not the old Celtic idea of the living and the dead, or the Christian tradition of Allhallows Eve," said O'Donnell, who is the host this week of an academic conference at the university examining Halloween. He plans to dress as Dracula for the official dinner.

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O'Donnell said that when he was a boy in Scotland, he and his friends regularly went door to door, playing out an old Celtic tradition.

"It was called guising," he explained. "You put an old sheet over your head and went to all the houses in the village, and you always had to do something, like sing a song or tell a joke." The children did not receive candy then - just apples and, maybe, peanuts, he said. Since there were no pumpkins, they carved turnips.

They did not play tricks.

Fear of tricks - vandalism, really - drives much of the anti-Halloween feeling here now. Many police forces around the country have added patrols to deal with Halloween-instigated problems, including egg-and-flour-throwing, attacks on fences and doors, menacing gatherings of disaffected drunken youths and the theft of garden ornaments.

Like many other forces, the Cheshire police in northwestern Britain have been distributing no-trick-or-treating posters for people to affix to their windows. Fifty-eight percent of homeowners in a recent survey by the Norwich Union insurance company said they had hidden in the back of their houses and turned off all the lights on Halloween, pretending that no one was home.

A similar question came up last weekend, in a Halloween discussion group on Mumsnet, a popular mothers' Web site here. The tips being traded were not about how to make pumpkin soup, but about how to repel would-be trick-or-treaters. "I've thought about removing the cover from my doorbell so they electrocute themselves," one participant wrote.

But much as some Britons are angry at being co-opted in yet another realm by the consumerist culture of the United States, some Americans living in Britain are annoyed at Britons' failure to grasp correct Halloween protocol, including the custom of raising money for Unicef.

Many English children also persist in saying "Happy Halloween" instead of "Trick or treat."

Andrew Arends, an American businessman who lives in London, was horrified over the weekend when, as he ate lunch at a restaurant, two children in costume walked in, whipped out little boxes and began trick-or-treating for money for themselves. This could have been a throwback to the old Guy Fawkes-related tradition in which children sat by the side of the road, demanding "a penny for the Guy," but it did not seem that way. The children were wearing Halloween outfits.

The weird thing, Arends said, was that the British patrons meekly handed over the cash.

"You would never see American children hustling for money on the 29th of October," he said.